Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Mis-conduct by two U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) officials led to the
“suspicious” shutdown of a federal scientific lab in Lakewood,
Colorado, without informing Congress, a skeptical lawmaker and career
engineer told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“The way they closed the facility without notifying Congress of it
until after the fact, that seems a little suspicious,” said Rep. Bruce
Westerman, an Arkansas Republican and member of the House Natural
Resources Committee, in an interview Monday.

“If it was just some tweaking of the equipment, then something’s
wrong. They didn’t close the facility over a piece of equipment being
mis-calibrated,” Westerman told TheDCNF. To date, no federal official
has publicly explained why the two analysts manipulated the data over
such a long period of time.

The unusual closure occurred eight years after a USGS analyst
resigned in 2008 while under investigation for manipulating
energy-related data from 1996 to 2008. He had worked in the inorganic
section of the Energy Geochemistry Laboratory. Despite the resignation,
however, a second analyst almost immediately continued distorting
research data until 2014.

...Because the data is so important, Westerman worries that “this stuff
has a domino effect. If that data is flawed coming out of that research
lab, then all that research downstream is flawed. I would hate to think
that any kind of project or any big policy decisions were made by some
flawed data.”

Westerman also wonders what happened to the backup data for the
research done by the two former USGS employees and he’s not happy with
what he’s been told to date by Department of Interior officials.

“Why were all of the notes and calculations and backup data either
never produced or destroyed? Why did it go on for so long? Why can’t
they just give us a straight answer,” Westerman asked. “It sure smells
fishy. There’s just too many things that raise a red flag and I just
don’t have a good feeling about it.”